Lekko

Lekko
[le•ko]
is a beautifully recorded upright piano played as softly as possible and captured with a collection of hand-made tube and ribbon mics through hand-made valve preamps for that warm, almost fragile sound.

Besides the soft sustains, you’ll also get characterful shorts (going from a hand-muted sound to full ringing) and irregular, unsynced tremolos as well as sound design patches created by processing the sounds through tape and vintage outboard. Among these, you’ll find sounds slowed down by playing the tape at half speed and textures modulated by rain.

Raw, beautiful, inspiring

This is not your standard, polished piano. It’s not about versatility, either. It has a particular sound that I happen to love. And I hope you will, too.

Both sustains and shorts have 5xRR (repetition samples) per every sampled note. I feel this really adds to the realism of the instrument, not only when playing repeating patterns.

When recording things this quiet, some noise is unavoidable. Just listen to Nils Frahm’s seminar ‘Felt’ album. These samples are nowhere near that hissy, but I’ve decided not to noise-reduce them to death in order to preserve the raw character.

The acustic piano is only half of the story, though. What you’ll also find is a collection of sound design ‘Afterglow’ patches, created by processing the piano using a variety of techniques and tools, including tape echoes, BBD delay and BBD reverb, lo-fi-ish early digital reverb, cassettes and tape.

Inspired by modern sound design of soundtracks like Hildur Guðnadóttir‘s ‘Chernobyl’ and Geoff Barrow’s and Ben Salisbury’s work on ‘Annihilation’, the result is a collection of bespoke patches that evoke that dusty, analogue vibe, ranging from fragile and soft to dirty remains of the original signal.

- Piano sustains (5xRR). Three dynamic layers (one recorded, two simulated).
- Characterful shorts (5xRR), going through finger-muted samples to full ringing. Three dynamic layers.
- Irregular tremolos performed at two intensities (freestyle, not synced to tempo or anything).
- All acustic patches include key release samples, recorded across the entire keyboard (5xRR).
- 6 sound design ‘Afterglow’ patches, created by processing the raw samples with a selection of outboard equipment and tape.
- 14 ‘Layers’ patches, allowing you to create your own combinations of sounds taken from the ‘Afterglow’ section.
- 7.26GB download (ncw loseless compression, 12.6GB original content). All samples recorded at 96kHz. Presented at 24 bit, 48kHz.
- Beautiful interface inspired by 20th century avant-garde design.
- Full version of Kontakt 5.8.1 required. This library does not work in the free Kontakt Player.
- Individually watermarked to you .
- Download via the Pulse app.